The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for determining a silence time of a wireless system, and more particularly to a method and an apparatus for dynamically adjusting a silence time of an un-predicted wireless system.
In wireless communications system, when a first peer device is communicated with a plurality of second peer devices concurrently, the first peer device needs to assign a communications period for each of the salve wireless devices. In other words, the first peer device needs to schedule the plurality of second peer devices. The scheduling between the plurality of second peer devices is an importance issue because this may affect the efficiency of the communications between the first peer device and the plurality of second peer devices. One of the challenges to schedule different time periods for the plurality of second peer devices is that some of the second peer devices may be the un-predicted wireless system, such as the wireless device in conforming to the specification of IEEE 802.11. For the slotted based wireless systems, i.e. predicted wireless system, such as Bluetooth and LTE (Long Term Evolution) systems, the traffic time for an incoming data is predetermined, therefore the scheduler in the first peer device can reserve predetermined time periods for the slotted based wireless systems. However, for the un-predicted wireless systems, the first peer device needs to estimate a time period of the incoming data such that no incoming data is transmitted to the first peer device before switching to communicate with other wireless device. Normally, before the first peer device switching to communicate with other wireless device from the un-predicted wireless system, the scheduler of the first peer device will set a silence time for the un-predicted wireless system in order to keep receiving the remaining data from the un-predicted wireless system. However, for different un-predicted wireless systems, the silence times are also different. If the silence time is set too large, then the time period of the un-predicted wireless system will be reduced. If the silence time is set too small, then the remaining data from the un-predicted wireless system may loss. Therefore, providing a method to determine an appropriate silence time for a wireless device to increase the efficiency of the wireless system is an urgent problem in this field.